While it may include sexuality and love as a wondrous part of spiritual experience, Traditional tantra teaches that success depends mostly on individual sadhana or practice. Granted, spontaneous lovemaking can be a spiritual union and creates an enormous amount of energy, but over time it is only as fruitful as the emotional and spiritual development of the individual lovers allows.

Consider this: If you prepare a meal, the meal is only as good as the freshness, purity, and nuanced flavors of the ingredients you make it with. Knowing a bunch of fancy cooking techniques, but only using poor, flavorless, or artificial ingredients, will just give a lot of
exotic looking, but ultimately bland, stale and flavorless food.

Now think of that meal as a tantric sexual practice, think of the ingredients as the lovers, and think of the cooking techniques as the sexual techniques, and you have the picture.

Neo tantrics place 80% emphasis on the cooking techniques and 20% on improving the quality of the ingredients.

Real tantrics place 90% emphasis on improving the quality of the ingredients and another 50% emphasis on improving the cooking techniques. Yes, I’m aware that those numbers add up to more than 100%. So you get the picture then…

Real tantrics do individual practices of purification, devotion, sensitization, and focus. A few of their many tools are physical exercises, diet, contemplation, concentration, visualization, mantra, relaxation exercises, methods of touching, expansion of awareness, and more.

Why? Because sex can create as many social masks, illusions, and obstacles as it strips away. Even 8-hour long, multiorgasmic, emotionally satisfying lovemaking. So the tantric needs to constantly observe herself, from solitude as well as lovemaking, to catch the ego when it gets in the way of seeing true self-nature (whether “good” or “bad”).

Most Neo-Tantrists never learned the full practices used to prepare the individual for maithuna (ritual union), because they themselves learned from New-Age gurus in a time when “anything goes” was the norm. The vast majority of Neo-tantric gurus today were at one time disciples of Osho (nee “Sri” Bhagwaan Rajneesh), who actually began his own spiritual life and achieved realization as a renunciate (*not* a tantric), and whose own knowledge of left-hand-path tantra came mostly from reading written works, not from initiation. Tantra, as you can imagine, was an easier sell to New Age “seekers” than renunciate meditation.

So the Neo-Tantrist gurus’ own knowledge of tantra, especially its higher practices, frequently has some big holes. The yogic practices they prescribe are usually cobbled together from American hatha yoga and watered-down tantric and Taoist visualizations and awareness meditations. These practices help, to be sure, and can achieve some sexual and emotional healing. But they will rarely lead to an awareness beyond the physical and pranic bodies. Tantrics seek the Source with more than just lip service.

One of the outcomes of Neo-Tantra’s incomplete knowledge of tantric sexual practices is that most Neo-Tantrists have sexual and throat centers developed way out of balance with their root, navel, heart, third eye, and crown. Here’s why:

The Neo-Tantrist elevation of the female G-spot orgasm as the be-all of orgasmic potential emphasizes the activation of yoni chakra (a small center in the middle of swadisthana, the sex center), and the “Ahhhh” vocalization they recommend making on exhalation opens the throat center, vishudda. The “oceanic” g-spot orgasm is really a swadishana-vishudda orgasm. It’s delicious, but real tantrics know that there are way deeper orgasms than even the most powerful g-spot orgasm, and it, like any experience, should be enjoyed sometimes, but not all the time. Why? There are orgasmic points deep within the vagina, known for millenia to tantrics, that modern sexologists have only begun to understand in the last two years. And they have nothing
to do with “female ejaculation.”But they do open out a more complete bodily and non-bodily pleasure than even a g-spot orgasm. Besides, tantrics have another focus they know is beyond orgasm…

For real tantrics, orgasms are gravy. The meal is opening the state of ananda (spiritual bliss, which is caused by release of DMT by the pineal gland, causing an orgasm-like explosion or radiance in the brain that may last for weeks or months…). Or even better, the experience of tremendously peaceful, though less ecstatic realization which can follow ananda. But that’s only if one learns through tantric meditation to steer the ship of one’s own mind and senses…

By today’s quick-fix standards, authentic tantra is a gradual path (ironic, because traditionally, tantra is the “fast” lane to enlightenment…) It does take a couple of years to achieve basic mastery… a very fun, awakening couple of years… but the process opens up the possibilities of life, love, and consciousness at a level that cannot be matched by modern modalities. Mastery of a sport or profession make take a decade or more… it certainly seems worth the investment understand the workings of your own mind, body, and sexuality.